Alphawood Gallery used to be a bank. For its latest exhibition, focusing on Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. camps during World War II, Alphawood curators placed a video of former Chicagoan inmates in front of the old bank vault, bars and all. The effect is striking: A familiar gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood has become a jail.

“Then They Came For Me” marks the 75th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the "internment" of all people on the West Coast thought to be a threat to national security. Nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent were “evacuated to and confined in isolated, fenced, and guarded relocation centers,” according to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

CHICAGO (March 9, 2017) Alphawood Gallery announces Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties, an original exhibition opening at 2401 N. Halsted Street, Chicago in June 2017.

Then They Came for Me will examine a difficult and painful episode in the history of the United States when the federal government forcibly removed and imprisoned thousands of American citizens without due process simply for being born Japanese American. Through an exploration of art, artifacts and programming, Then They Came For Me will invite comparisons between this dark chapter in America’s past and current political events. The exhibition will be free and open to the public.